creationism
pharyngula | April 2, 2007I've got a copy of the student paper for Ridgewater College, the Ridgewater Review, volume 11, number 5, which contains an announcement:
Can anyone know for certain how the earth began?
Ridgewater's Christians in Action student club is sponsoring talks by Dr Randy Guliuzza exploring this topic and more on Wednesday, April 11th in the Ridgewater College Hutchinson campus commons area at 11:00 am and 5:30 pm.
By golly, I am so tempted to attend. The earlier talk conflicts with one of my classes, but I might be able to get away in time to catch the evening session. It might be interesting —…
clock | April 2, 2007OK, admit, how many of you really got suckered? (in reference to yesterday)
Quite a lesson in credulity and perception for many...(yup, I was in on the joke from the very beginning/planning/execution stages)
pharyngula | April 2, 2007Yesterday, the Panda's Thumb revealed that Michael Egnor had only been pretending to be a creationist. They even linked to his confession at Evolution Views and News. I chimed in, defending our prior work on Egnor's absurd claims with argument that "the line between creationist parody and creationist reality is drawn awfully fine".
It was an April Fool's joke, of course. Egnor hasn't been kidding — he really is that kooky. Or is he? His real April Fool's Day post was remarkable in its hypocrisy and religious credulity.
What if experimental evidence demonstrated that we could account for…
pharyngula | April 1, 2007A world-class neurosurgeon couldn't possibly have been as stupid as Michael Egnor — the denial of even the most basic and medically relevant evidence of evolution in bacteria, the outright denial of the importance of the scientific literature, dismissing it as "chaff", the obtuse insistence on self-contradictory definitions of information — it should have told us long ago that our leg was being pulled. We put a lot of effort into debunking arguments that only a purblind ignorant creationist could have fallen for, and we should have noticed that Egnor was just a little too far over the top.
As…
pharyngula | April 1, 2007Almost two weeks ago, I wrote about that creationist teacher who was fired in Sisters, Oregon — Kris Helphinstine had been showing his freshman biology class some PowerPoint presentations designed to cast doubt on biology, rather than to inform the students about the facts and evidence. Now a Bend newspaper has given a few more details of the grounds for firing, and most entertaining of all, has put up copies of the PowerPoint presentations! Aficionados of both bad creationism and bad PowerPoint will savor these.
Both are afflicted with ugly and inconsistent layout, and it's always reassuring…
clock | March 31, 2007Jason drove down to Knoxville and attended an ID-Creationist "conference" and lived to tell about it. And tell he did, in five installments:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
All the usual suspects were there and all the usual nonsense was spouted, but the most interesting part was the Subway-line conversation Jason had (in Part Four), debating a handful of attendees and noticing age-difference in their thought-processes and debating strategies.
evolvingthoughts | March 30, 2007
There will no doubt be many April Fool's gags and hoaxes tomorrow. None will have the cachet of the Spaghetti Harvest, or the discovery of Homo micturans, because you can't get the wood, you know, but they will all be worthwhile relief from the inanity and insanity of our present society.
But there is a hoax doing the rounds that, while not an April Fool's gag, is a gag about April the 1st.
The story is this:
Hooray For That Judge In Florida, an atheist became incensed over the preparation for Easter and Passover holidays and decided to contact the local ACLU about the discrimination…
mikethemadbiologist | March 30, 2007...or something like that. By way of skippy, comes this, erm, fascinating creationist exposition on the inertness of peanut butter:
People can't really be this stupid, can they?
pharyngula | March 30, 2007Afarensis takes on both Sal Cordova and Jonathan Wells on the subject of anthropology. Would you believe that those two creationist frauds are talking out of their hats and are readily spotted as dishonest kooks when they discuss anything in which their reader has any expertise? I know, I was so surprised myself.
pharyngula | March 29, 2007Hmmm…it seems Dr Egnor, shill for the DI, has been criticizing me in some podcasts. I don't listen to the DI's podcasts and I'm not planning to start, but fortunately, Orac caught a few of his remarks. It's all very peculiar: in a previous post, I showed him that it is easy to find lots of information in the published literature that rebuts his claim, I explained how the mechanism works, and I plucked out a single example and described it. What does Egnor call the scientific literature?
…I call it citation chaff. You know, chaff was stuff that pilots would throw into the air during World War…
mikethemadbiologist | March 29, 2007In response to us foul-mouthed evolutionists, Casey Luskin asks, "Yet for all their numbers and name-calling, not a single one has answered Egnor's question: How does [sic] Darwinian mechanisms produce new biological information?" I've never liked the whole "biological information" concept.
As far as I can tell, the creationists started bandying the term about after this George Gilder article in Wired was published:
Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists…
mikethemadbiologist | March 28, 2007Blogger Mike Stark recently debated Myron Ebell about global warming. Apparently, Mike Stark did more than just hold his own, which is pretty impressive considering the debate was hosted by the ultraconservative Federalist Society. Stark had this interesting point about credibility, which is similar to a point I made about creationist credibility:
First of all, when arguing with somebody that either has no credibility or is not arguing a credible position, don't donate the credibility they need to be seen as your equal.
You see, by calling his credibility into question immediately - and…
pharyngula | March 28, 2007He mangles science, now he defames history. Michael Egnor is like the Swiss army knife of creationist hackery.
Former Vice President Al Gore famously claimed to have invented the Internet because years ago he was in the Senate and sponsored a bill. The assertion that Charles Darwin's theory was indispensable to classical and molecular genetics is a claim of an even lower order. Darwin's theory impeded the recognition of Mendel's discovery for a third of a century, and Darwin's assertion that random variation was the raw material for biological complexity was of no help in decoding the genetic…
pharyngula | March 28, 2007There's a very good reason I reposted an old reply to a creationist today. It's from 2004, way back shortly after I'd started this blog, and it addresses in simple terms the question of how ordinary biological mechanisms can produce an increase in information. I brought it up because Casey Luskin is whining again. He says the "Darwinists" have not answered any of the questions Michael Egnor, their pet credentialed creationist du jour, has asked.
Yet for all their numbers and name-calling, not a single one has answered Egnor's question: How does Darwinian mechanisms [sic] produce new…
pharyngula | March 28, 2007
A creationist, Rob McEwen, left me a little comment here which lists a number of his objections to evolution. It’s a classic example of the genre, and well illustrates the problem we have. The poor fellow has been grossly misinformed, but is utterly convinced that he has the truth. I’m not going to dismantle his entire line of blather (thanks to Loren Petrich, who has already briefly pointed out the flaws in his thinking), but I do want to show what I mean with one example.
Here’s what Mr McEwen says:
Mutations have NEVER produced additional DNA structures. NEVER! Even as scientists study…
pharyngula | March 27, 2007And it's a right embarrassing spotlight to be caught under, I imagine. A couple of years ago, The New Republic polled various well-known conservatives about their position on evolutionary biology; Digby reviews their responses, and they're a mess (I also summarized their views diagrammatically way back then). Most wouldn't be caught dead admitting to believing the kind of nonsense Ken Ham favors, so they're spluttering evasively and many are embracing with great relief the concept of Intelligent Design.
Digby is making the point that it reveals how uncomfortable the leaders of the…
pharyngula | March 27, 2007Ken Ham's fabulous fake museum is going to open soon, on May 28. There are grounds for concern here.
But Eugenie Scott, a former University of Kentucky anthropologist who is director of the California-based National Center for Science Education, said the information provided in the museum "is not even close to standard science."
Scott visited the museum recently as part of a British Broadcasting Corp. radio program. Although she didn't get a tour, she saw enough to know that the museum will be professionally done. And, she says, that's worrisome.
"There are going to be students coming into…
pharyngula | March 27, 2007They need every scrap of brainpower they can get, and the two videos at this link will suck out your brain with the awesome power of their stupidity.
Most of you are probably already familiar with the banana video, which tries to conclude that God exists from the perfection of the video. What you will also find at that link is … the peanut butter video. Evolution is disproven because life (by which he apparently means animals, like ants) does not spontaneously arise in the jars of peanut butter on grocery store shelves.
Seriously.
Not only do we not think that there is a significant…
pharyngula | March 27, 2007Iain is looking for photos in a particular pose.
So maybe you didn't like the Blasphemy Challenge; this is a much more restrained exercise in which the fellow is going to collect photos of people holding an apple if they accept the evidence for biological evolution, or holding a light bulb if they believe in that evidence-free creationism stuff, and they'll be strung together into an animated video. It's easy, and I figure I'll do it this week (with an apple, of course).
Watch the video, he explains exactly how to compose the picture, and he has a lovely accent, too.